David R. Heffelfinger

Being a child of the 80's, I love listening to music I grew up with. Unfortunately, it seems most of the 80's compilation CDs out there made a conscious effort to find the suckiest songs of the 80's and put them together in a CD. It seemed like the really good music from that era had just but disappeared.

Today while browsing Amazon I ran into some MP3 downloads for some songs I hadn't heard in about 20 years, the good stuff that I thought had dissappeared, I, of course, became very eager to add these songs to my collection.

When downloading individual songs in Amazon, no special software is needed, however, the Amazon MP3 downloader is needed to download complete albums.

They have a few Linux versions for Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. The only version of Ubuntu they support is Gutsy Gibbon, which is two versions behind the latest, Intrepid Ibex.

Feeling brave, I tried to install the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Amazon MP3 Downloader under Intrepid Ibex, unfortunately the installer failed, telling me that the architecture was wrong. The deb package available on Amazon is for i386, and I run the 64 bit version of Ubuntu Linux.

I googled around to see if there was a way to install 32 bit packages under 64 bit Ubuntu, I ran into getlibs.

getlibs is a script that downloads any missing libraries for any installed package.

In summary, what I had to do to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader under 64 bit Ubuntu was to get getlibs from http://www.boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs-all.deb. Simply clicking on the link results in the package opening in GDebi, it should install without issues.

Once getlibs is installed, the Amazon MP3 Downloader needs to be installed, passing a parameter to ignore the architecture difference:

This will install the package, it will be placed under /usr/bin/amazonmp3, however at this time it won't run properly because of missing libraries. In order to get the libraries, we need to run the getlibs script:

At this point the application should be "good to go" and able to download MP3 albums from Amazon MP3 Downloads.

It has come to my attention that NetBeans 6.5 final is now available.

It can be downloaded from the NetBeans web site.

If you would like to learn the ins and outs of enterprise Java development, my book, Java EE 5 Development with NetBeans 6, may help.